A Prince Among Stones (19 page)

Once I was out of the bank, it seemed as if I might be able to broaden my client base within the music industry beyond working solely with the Rolling Stones. I had previously had one other foray into the music industry with Cat Stevens, whose manager, Barry Krost, had been introduced to me by David Geffen.

Cat Stevens had a record contract with Jerry Moss at A&M which had been fulfilled by his current album,
Foreigner
. He had originally been signed to Decca before moving to A&M, where he had enjoyed great success with albums like
Tea For The Tillerman
and
Catch Bull At Four
. Barry Krost thought that his client might benefit from some help in drafting the right contract for a move to one of the major US labels, and David Geffen suggested that I might be the person to do it. So Barry and I worked to try and get Cat Stevens a better contract.

In the event those negotiations did not come to anything but I did manage to give Barry Krost some hints about touring, advise him about improving his touring contract and generally provide some financial thoughts to increase the income of Cat Stevens.

Later I was again involved with Barry and Stevens, when Stevens was in the process of moving towards Islam. Born Steven Georgiou – by birth he was half Greek-Cypriot and half Swedish – he had now chosen to change his name a second time and take the name Yusuf Islam. As a result of his religious conversion he grew nervous about his understanding of the tax situation, if he followed what he understood to be a ban on any interest he would receive on his money.

We had several rather difficult meetings about this, because one of the things we had done was to arrange for the bank to pay him a fixed, though higher, amount of money against his royalties for a longer period of time before he would enjoy the basic capital sum at the end of the period.

For one meeting, I was summoned to a meeting in Barry Krost's office in Curzon Street, in London's West End. When I arrived at the house, Cat Stevens took one look at my shoes and said, ‘Weren't you told to take your shoes off?' So I said, ‘Yes.' He raised an eyebrow. I continued, ‘I see no reason why I should and I don't want to.'

During the meeting I told him, ‘What you are trying to do is to get me to agree to pay you more money than we are giving you if you change from having this guarantee every year in the future. You fail to understand that the reason we can give you more is because we are using the interest. You are not. And secondly even if you were there is no reason why you should give up money for which you already have signed for and negotiated.'

So he said, ‘Well, you see, the Prophet, his name be blessed, doesn't really approve of music, although there is a moment when he hears Fatima play a pipe and he is moved by that.'

He then pointed out that the Prophet also approved of poetry, and that therefore he was thinking of putting out a book of his poems. Whereupon I said, ‘Whatsoever the Prophet says, and whether he is blessed or not, that is your interpretation. In this conversation you must consider whether he wants to pay you a large amount of money for your recorded songs, which are very popular, rather than pay you large sums for your verses which have no public at all.'

At that point we ended our conversation and I left, half expecting that, had I removed my shoes as requested, they would shortly have followed me out of the door in short order and at high speed, aimed at my head.

After leaving Leopold Joseph the most significant other client in this period was Pink Floyd. I started off representing David Gilmour, the guitarist, and later negotiating the terms of the split between the band and Roger Waters. Waters was trying to wrest control of the group for himself, on the basis that he was the primary songwriter – and, indeed, it is fair to say that the album, show and film of
The Wall
was mainly his work in terms of songwriting, and the anti-military sentiment of
The Final Cut
had been very much about his father, who was killed on active service for Britain in the Second World War.

The main reason I was brought in was to examine a situation that had occurred with their manager, Steve O'Rourke. Bernard Sheridan, who was the Pink Floyd's lawyer and a friend from LSE days of my partner Louis Heymann, told me that he thought David Gilmour was being taken for a ride and needed somebody to look after him. I made a note in my journal: ‘London. Lunched with David Gilmour (not the young historian but the Pink Floyd guitarist) at Wiltons. He was, of course, late and I dreaded that he would be sent away as he was bound not to be wearing a tie. He arrived without a tie and with a garnish of stubble – looking like a lorry driver's mate – but was allowed in.'

One of the first things I noticed when I became David's adviser was the fact that Steve O'Rourke was charging David – and Nick Mason, the drummer – more commission than he did Roger Waters, which was unusual, to say the least. I felt that my job was to change that arrangement, which I did, but this, alas, complicated my relationship with Steve O'Rourke.

Steve O'Rourke was obsessed with being a creative manager – a mistake I was determined never to make – and he thought that Roger Waters was the key person in the band, which blurred his focus. I thought it was a great shame. I think an element of outside pragmatism was a help.

There was a battle royal over the rights to the name Pink Floyd. Roger Waters claimed that he was entitled to use the name. David Gilmour and Nick Mason had at least the advantage of greater numbers, especially when they had co-opted the keyboard player, Rick Wright, to join their faction. It took a lot of time. David Gilmour never bothered to overcome the dislike that he had for Roger Waters. I told him, ‘It doesn't matter whether you like him or dislike him. You make a huge amount of money with him.' And there I failed. He just couldn't bear to work with Roger.

Roger had his office in Ruvigny Gardens near the Thames in Putney. When I went there it reminded me that my mother had had a house in the same street. One evening she was entertaining a group of friends and a burglar forced his way into the house and burst into a room where she and the friends were gathered. Caught off guard and faced with so many people, and my mother looking rather ferocious, he turned on his heels and ran out. My mother went after him, hooked him by the collar, and said, ‘Come along, you'd better have a drink.' It turned out the miscreant lived in the same street, so she made a deal with him that he would look after the house whenever she was away, as a kind of informal personal security guard. That was typical of my mother's attitude to life.

That there was any prospect of resolving the impasse between the members of Pink Floyd was in no small part due to the fact that Roger Waters took on Peter Rudge as his manager. I had known Peter very well ever since he had been tour director for the Stones, and within the space of two meetings with Peter we had done a deal which satisfied both parties.

I got the Pink Floyd name into the hands of Gilmour and Mason. With Roger Waters now an ex-Floyd member and the three-man version back in action – although Rick Wright was retained only as a salaried sideman rather than a full partner – I was involved in their next tour, but before negotiations for a second got very far I had to go back to concentrating on the Rolling Stones.

I also had a brief involvement in the 1980s with Terence Trent D'Arby. The London MD of CBS, Paul Russell, contacted me and asked if I would consider taking Terence on as a client: they thought he had enormous potential, but, equally, said he was in a tremendous mess. There was a wonderful moment when I managed to persuade Mark Birley to allow this New York-born rock star, clad in black leather and chrome, into the urbane surroundings of Harry's Bar on South Audley Street. ‘After all,' Mark observed with a smile, ‘he does have a fine English aristocratic surname . . .' I was only involved in Terence's first album,
Introducing The Hardline
, from which he did very well. It turned out to be the last of my flirtations with other artists. The Rolling Stones were always my main concern.

By coincidence Leopold Joseph, after my departure, had retained a few music industry clients: Peters and Lee, Suzi Quatro and Smokie, but they never formed a major part of the bank's ongoing business. In 2004, after eighty-five years, the bank relinquished its independence and was acquired by the Bermudan bank N. T. Butterfield. Of the original consortium that Alexis de Redé and I had assembled in 1963 only Robin Herbert remained, having served the bank for longer even than Leopold Joseph.

By the time I left Leopold Joseph in 1981, the City was completely different from my first days there. When I had started, lunch was an essential part of the job, nothing was written down and by and large people trusted each other. By the early 1980s written data had become necessary and reciprocal trust had nearly disappeared: the revenge of the new world.

In that first year on my own in 1981 the primary focus in my work with the Rolling Stones was a major gamble as to whether the band would complete their US tour. Mick was not at all sure that he should. He was only persuaded, I think, by my impressing on him that if he did not do this tour the Rolling Stones would go out with a whimper rather than a bang – and also that there was a lot of cash to be picked up to pay for all the costs of his divorce from Bianca.

Of course his fear, when he got me over to New York in July to see the band during the filming of a promotional video clip for the new record, was that the rest of the band were, in his view, undisciplined, incompetent, unenthusiastic and incapable of the sustained work needed.

I pointed out to Keith, who had exactly the same fears about Mick and the other band members, that he was fixed in his 1960s King's Road time capsule and that what they felt they lacked in youth should be made up by discipline. Because, I said, without care, the band could have been seen as a frightening sight with no sense of preparation. But it must be remembered that an audience loves seeing trapeze artists perform without a net . . .

This was the beginning of an era when Mick and Keith really did not see eye to eye. Given the new stability in their private lives, one might have imagined a new maturity settling upon them, but the opposite occurred. One of the main factors was the issue of their solo work outside the Rolling Stones: Keith had released one album as a solo artist, and Bill Wyman had taken everyone by surprise by having a hit with his single ‘(Si, Si) Je suis un rock star'. Mick became very exercised about his own solo career.

Mick and I had long conversations about what he should do. I said that I thought the next album he did should be a solo release, so he could see how it went, and see how he made out without the band. If it was as successful financially as a Rolling Stones album, then obviously that would become an alternative option for him, to go it alone.

When the rest of the Stones heard about this, they were naturally very disappointed since it looked as if they were just about to make significant money from the tours after all the changes we had put in place.

The differences were heightened because of other unilateral decisions Mick had made. In 1980 he had determined to get rid of Earl McGrath from his role as President of Rolling Stones Records. The way he set about this was by sabotaging all the plans that Atlantic and Earl had put in place, based on conversations he and Earl had had, which Mick then denied. What happened was precisely what Mick wanted to happen: Earl flounced in and gave his notice. I was very sad about it, because Earl was such a good person to have involved liaising over the cover designs, and had in fact been one of the few people who had been able to maintain good relations with both Mick and Keith, right up to the point that Mick decided in his own mind Earl was too much of ‘Keith's man'.

Mick was consequently delighted when Earl handed in his notice. I had tried hard to convince Earl not to resign. ‘Don't you realise the benefits you are enjoying, not only your wages but all the secretarial support? Mary at the next desk is arranging your travel, booking tables in the best restaurants, organising your life for you.' But Earl would not be swayed, left, and consequently life with Atlantic became much more difficult by several degrees.

Another area of difficulty concerned the role of Jane Rose, who had been the secretary to Peter Rudge at the time Peter was the Stones' creative manager and tour director. Jane then moved to work for Mick as a secretary, but after their working relationship ended, she subsequently moved to work with Keith and became his amanuensis. This was the kind of situation, perfectly normal in some ways, that could exacerbate any underlying tensions. It was a sign that things between Mick and Keith were moving towards a situation with all the destructive potential of the Roger Waters–David Gilmour relationship in Pink Floyd.

Things came alarmingly close to the edge of the precipice when we were negotiating terms for a new contract with CBS under Walter Yetnikoff in 1983. For a period the Stones had had two record companies: we wanted to return to a situation where one single record company handled them worldwide. Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic was not prepared to make a high enough offer, which CBS
were
ready to deliver.

Matters were proceeding, I thought, in a positive direction. Walter Yetnikoff was highly professional, if irascible. He had started out as an attorney at CBS Records in the 1960s (we are almost exact contemporaries, I have discovered, as he was also born in August 1933) before becoming president in the mid-1970s and reinventing himself as a larger than life character. The title of his own memoir says everything about the reputation he wanted to convey:
Howling at the Moon: The Odyssey of a Monstrous Music Mogul in an Age of Excess
. His bad temper could flare up unexpectedly, which meant that one never quite knew what was going to happen in any discussion.